Le Bois

“This is where everyone looking for it on their GPS will now end up,” I say with a smirk as we pass a subdivision under construction, apparently to have the same name as the historic site we’re heading toward.

Bonneville Point was part of my first conversation with Alexis when we met him at the home of his first host family last summer. His English wasn’t good then and I don’t know if he understood I was promising to eventually take him to a “famous” French site just up the hill.

Almost a year later, we’ve finally crawled up a bumpy Jeep trail that follows the path of the old Oregon Trail from Boise to a site atop an eastern hill where the French Captain Bonneville and his troops are said to have cried “les bois!” (the woods!) at seeing trees for the first time in several days of desert marching. Thus Boise was named.